Defenders of Democracy Part 35

It is sad not to be needed. Yes, Madame, blue for you where mine is black, and in place of the crepe something very brilliant. It is only Americans that we can make gay now, and it keeps the women in the sewing room of good cheer to work in colors. Too dear you think? Ah, no, Madame, observe the model!"

Conscious that she had taken the basest advantage of my sympathy, and glad that she had done so I went to dejeuner with a feeling that I had deserved it which I might not otherwise have enjoyed.

We were lunching at the restaurant on the Seine which felt for a short time the upheaval of war. Among the first called to the front had been the proprietor, and the august deputies whose custom it was to take their midday meal at this famous eating place had suffered from an unevenness of the cuisine. He is back at his establishment now, an ammunition maker on the night shift and the excellent and watchful patron at noon.

Our guests came promptly, for France still eats, although, if I can say anything so anomalous, does not stop to do so. The war talk continues albeit one carries it more lightly through a meal. A French officer arrived in the only automobile of his garage which the government had not commandeered. We looked down upon it stealthily that we might not give offense to his chauffeur, for the car is a Panhard in the last of its teens--which holds no terrors to a woman but is a gloomy age for a motor. An American architect from our Clearing House bowed over my hand a little more Gallic in these days than the Gaul himself. He has a right to the manners of the country. He had come over at the beginning of the war for a month and is determined to stick it out if he never builds another railway station. "To see the troops march through the Arc de Triomphe!" is the cry of the Americans, but the French do not express themselves so dramatically.

There is drama enough, though, even in the filing of papers at every American relief society. That and the new sensation of work serves to hold the dilettante of our country to his long task.

"This is the president's office," you will be told in a hushed voice outside some stately door. Then one discovers in Mr. President a playmate of Mayfair or Monte Carlo or Taormina who may never previously have used a desk except as a support for the signing of checks.

Our friend had been engaged that morning upon the re-ticketing of the Lafayette Kits which had come back from the front because there was no longer a Gaspard to receive them. I put this down that any young girl of our country who does not hear from "her soldier"

may understand the silence. And sometimes the poilu is a little confused, writing a charming letter of thanks to "Monsieur Lafayette"

himself.

A man takes coffee at dejeuner but finishes his cigar en route to work. We were at the edge of Paris before the Ill.u.s.trator had thrown his away. We were not in the car of ancient lineage but in that relic of other days a real automobile without the great white letters of the army upon its sides and bonnet. Yet we were going into the heart of the Army. We would not be among the derelicts of battle that afternoon but with men sound of mind and body, and the thought was grateful that there would be nothing to anguish over. We were to visit two cantonments, rough barracks, in one of which the men gathered after their "permission" for a re-equipment; while at the second one were those soldiers who had become separated from their regiments, and who were sent there until the companies--if they existed--could be found, and the "isolated"

again dispatched to the front.

I had antic.i.p.ated a very relieving afternoon. The sun shone, the long road led to open country, and many circling aeroplanes over an aviation field nearby gave the air of a fete. Only the uniforms of the English and American women who are attached to each of these many cantonments suggested any necessitous combating of the grim reaper.

Yet they are not nurses of the body but of the spirit. From modest little vine covered sheds erected in each ugly open s.p.a.ce they disperse good cheer augmented by coffee and cigarettes (and such small comforts as we Americans send them) after the regulation army rations are served by the commissary. They hear the men's stores, comfort the unhappy ones, chaff the gloomy ones, and when they have a moment's breathing s.p.a.ce write letters to such of those as have asked for a correspondent.

One of these women--an American--was intent upon this occupation at the first canteen we visited. She admitted that she was tired but she must answer her letters. She was rather grave about it, "I write to sixty-eight," she said, "and I'll tell you why. At least I will tell you a little of it and you can read the rest. I was on night duty. There is always one of us here. The men have just come from visiting their homes and some of them are blue and cannot sleep. Rude to us? Oh, never! I had written letters almost all night and it was time to make the morning coffee, yet there was still one to do. I was tempted to put it aside. I didn't remember the man, but he had sent me a word of thanks. Well, somehow I did answer it between the moment of filling the cauldron and getting ready for the day. Here is his reply--it came this morning--"

Translating crudely from the letter I read aloud to our little circle: "Dear Madame, you have saved my life. I have no friends and no people left for I am from the invaded districts, so on one writes me. To-day I was on duty as the officer came into our trench with the mail. He called my name. He gave me permission to leave the listening post to receive your valued letter. While at his side a sh.e.l.l tore up entirely my post. I think you, Madame, that I am spared to fight for France--"

I regarded her with longing. She had been the controller of a destiny. I suppose we are all that when we bend our best efforts, but seldom are we so definitely apprised of the reward of untiring duty.

A petty officer pa.s.sed by the shack with a paper in his hands.

There were no sounding trumpets, but the men recognized the paper and rose from the ground where they had been lounging to hear him read the list of those who were to return immediately to the front.

As the names were called each one summoned turned without comment or exclamation or expletive, picked up his kit dumped in a corner, slung on the heavy equipment, saw that the huge loaf of bread was secure--the extra shoes--refilled his canteen and moved over to the barred gate. Occasionally one shook hands with a comrade and all saluted the women of the little flower-bedecked hut. An order was given and the gate was opened. They filed out into the dusty road on their march to the railway station. The gate was closed.

A little hill rose higher than the ground of the barracks and we could see them once again--stout little men in patched uniforms--bending unresistingly under their burdens, the heavy steel helmets gleaming but faintly in the sun. Another detachment entered the barracks.

It was coffee time now. The soldiers were lingering politely about with their tin cups in hand--not too expectantly, so as to a.s.sure the ladies that if by any chance there was no coffee they would not be disappointed. The gentlewoman in attendance had recently come from a canteen near the front where soup is made and often eight thousand bowls of it served in a day. The skin of her arms and hands is, I fear, permanently unlovely from the steam of the great kettles--or perhaps I should say permanently lovely now that one knows the cause of the branding. I offered to pour in her place and she a.s.sented.

The men came up to the little bar. I began to pour. I had thought I was about to do them a service. I knew with the first cup that it was they who were doing me one. All the unrest and misery of my idle if observing days in France was leaving me. I was pushing back the recollection with the sweetness of physical effort. I was at work. There is no living in France--or anywhere now--unless one is at work. I served and served and urged fresh cups upon them.

They thought I was generous--I could not tell them that I had not known a happy instant till this coffee pouring time. I had not recognized that it was toiling with the hands that would bring a surcease to the beating of queries at my bewildered brain. There are no answers to this war. One can only labor for it and so, strangely, forget it.

Late that afternoon I had a cup of tea in a ground floor room of a big Parisian hotel which has been freely a.s.signed to an American woman for the least known of all our relief work. I had come that I might argue with her into giving up her long task for a brief rest. My contention was to have been that she could stop at any time as her work is never recognized. I found her doing up a parcel of excellent garments for a man and three women. They were to be a.s.signed to the family of a respected painter of the Latin Quarter.

They will never know who is the middleman, and it has chanced that she has dined in company with her day's donation.

As I observed her tired tranquility I felt my argument growing pointless. Whether it was coffee or the unacknowledged dispenser of clothing to the uncrying needy it was service, and though my arm muscles ached I could understand that it is the idle boy in Paris which does not rest at night.

And so I come tot he last sheet of the romance which is serving so humbly my war-time needs. There is s.p.a.ce for the dinner and the closing in of the gentle night thanks to the repeated, fervid declarations of the lovers on the other side of the paper. We had been with the men that afternoon. We were among the officers that evening. We dined at one of the great restaurants which has timorously reopened its doors to find eager families ready to feast honored sons. At one table sat three generations, the father of the boy concealing his pride with a Gallic interest in the menu, but the grandfather futilely stabbed the snails as his gleaming old eyes kept at attention upon the be-medalled lad. Pretty women, too, were there, subdued in costuming but with that amiable acceptance of their position which is not to be found among the more eager "lost ones" of other countries. And I enjoyed some relief in their evidence once more, and some inward and scarcely to-be-expressed solace in the thought that those soldiers who henceforth must go disfigured through a fastidious world can every buy companionship.

There was a theater attached to the restaurant. Through the gla.s.s doors we could see an iridescence of scant costumes, but the audience was light, and we ourselves preferred, as a more satisfactory ending to our day, to walk quietly toward the Arc de Triomphe which is waiting, waiting for fresh glories. On the other side of this last sheet of paper my lovers had so walked together. But upon looking over their pa.s.sionate adventures I have discovered, at last, why the romance has never found a market. On one side and then on the other I have read and reread the two experiences. Yes, I find the LOVE-story curiously lacking in love.

[signed] Louise Closser Hale

Children of War

Not for a transient victory, or some Stubborn belief that we alone are right; Not for a code or conquest do we fight, But for the crowded millions still to come.

This, unborn generations, is your war, Although it is our blood that pays the price.

Be worthy, children, of our sacrifice, And dare to make your lives worth fighting for.

We give up all we love that you may loathe Intrigue and darkness, that you may disperse The ranks of ugly tyrannies and, worse, The sodden languor and complacent sloth.

Do not betray us, then, but come to be Creation's crowning splendor, not its slave; Knowing our lives were spent to keep you brave, And that our deaths were meant to make you free.

[signed] Louis Untermeyer

Courtesy "Collier's Weekly."

Khaki-Boy

Where the torrent of Broadway leaps highest in folly and the nights are riddled with incandescent tire and chewing gum signs; jazz bands and musical comedies to the ticket speculators' tune of five dollars a seat, My Khaki-Boy, covered with the golden h.o.a.r of three hundred Metropolitan nights rose to the slightly off key grand finale of its eighty-first matinee, curtain slithering down to the rub-a-dud-dub of a score of pink satin drummer boys with slim ankles and curls; a Military s.e.xtette of the most blooded of Broadway ponies; a back ground of purple eye-lidded privates enlisted from the ranks of Forty-Second Street; a three hundred and fifty dollar a week sartorial sergeant in khaki and spotlight, embracing a ninety pound ingenue in rhinestone shoulder-straps. The tired business man and his lady friend, the Bronx and his wife, Adelia Ohio, Dead heads, Bald heads, Sore heads, Suburbanites, Sybarites; the poor dear public making exit sadder than wiser.

On the unpainted side of the down slithering curtain, a canvas mountain-side was already rumbling rearward on castors. An overhead of foliage jerked suddenly higher, revealed a vista of brick wall.

A soldiers' encampment, tents and all, rolled up like a window shade.

The ninety pound ingenue, withholding her silver-lace flouncings from the raw edges of moving landscape, high-stepped to a rearward dressing room; the khaki clad hero brushing past her and the pink satin drummer boys for first place down a spiral staircase.

Miss Blossom De Voe, pinkest of satin drummer boys, withdrew an affronted elbow, the corners of her mouth quivering slightly, possibly of their own richness. They were dewy, fruit-like lips, as if Nature were smiling with them at her own handiwork.

"Say, somebody around here better look where he's going or mama's khaki-boy will be calling for an arnica high-ball. What does he think I yam, the six o'clock subway rush?"

Miss Elaine Vavasour wound down the spiral ahead of Miss De Voe, the pink satin blouse already in the removing.

"Go suck a quince Blos. It's good for crazy bone and fallen arch."

"If you was any funnier, Elaine, you'd float," said Miss De Voe withdrawing a hair pin as she wound downward, an immediate avalanche of springy curls released.

Beneath the stage of the Gotham Theater a corridor of dressing rooms ran the musty subterranean length of the sub cellar. A gaseous gloomy dampness here; this cave of the purple lidded, so far below the level of reality.

At the door of Miss De Voe's eight by ten, shared by four, dressing room, one of the back drop of privates, erect, squarebacked, head thrown up by the deep-dipping cap vizor, emerged at sight of her, lifted hat revealing a great permanent wave of hair that could only be born not bought.

"H'lo, Hal."